Thursday, April 29, 2010

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way from the Point of No Return

So this afternoon I got a couple of fillings at the dentist. No Novocain or anything! It was awesome and the whole process went a lot faster because of it.

This meant I could go for a ride!

A couple of days ago on Twitter or someplace I mentioned getting a new road bike I was itching to try out and since Thursdays are the day I ride with my crew from work why not go solo today.

So okay... nothing sexy ever happens before you cross the Rubicon. When I write my great space opera I am going to open it up with being at the place where it is to late to turn around.

Which is how the rest of this blog is going to be.

17 miles out and I am at the Guana River State Park! This bike rocks! Smooth Tricked out. Seat isn’t killing my ass. I turn around and enjoy the wind to my back for the ride back to the house.

When I am riding I seriously try to believe I am on my spaceship blowing though the cosmos. This dear reader does not make me nuts. What does that is when I am swimming I try to imagining that I am spacewalking!

There is this interface between the open stretch of A1A and the back street that runs though The Sawgrass Country Club and The Ponte Vedre Inn and Spa called Micklers Landing. Micklers Landing is a county park with awesome parking and great beach access. It is also a very high traffic area.

So here I am riding a little to close to the shoulder. Well there wasn’t really a shoulder. It was the white line then the grass. So there I was to close to the edge when the car got a little to close to me. He had to deal with me and opposing traffic, so I lost. The front tire slipped off of the shoulder and I tried like hell to bring my vessel around but it went and conveniently I with it. I launched and rolled into the small ditch that is part of the retention pond system. Not to worry the vines kept me from rolling to far but they did secure me in a fashion that would make most Dommes proud! Problem is I was under a low lying largish variety of indigenous flora. So I am looking up at the bike in the tall grass not seeing any sign of the road.

I should mention at this point I kinda chose to stay tied up in thorny vines while I was waiting for my wind to return and trying to decide if I wrecked my rotator cuff again.

By the time I got disentangled and crawled out of the muck the gentleman that really didn’t have much to do with me winding up in a mini swamp had turned around was trying to help me up. The funny thing is evidently I had an audience when I frapped in! There were three other vehicles pulled over the side of the road. Of them only one of their occupants had bothered to exit his vehicle. When the other two saw me walking on my own they left. Kinda irked me. I was only good enough for you to stop, but not actually do anything for????

I fixed the bike. Cleaned the mud off, and got my butt back to the ranch.

Then the really amazing thing happened!!!

It’s not that I felt I was bullet proof that I was riding as fast as I could the last 15 miles. It was the pain and stiffness we starting to make their presence felt. As I am writing this in preparation for its eventual posting I am dining on a cocktail of Ibuprofen and left over prescription strength pain reducers… I think. Whatever they are they are crushed and dissolved in a bottle of fierce watermelon Gatorade. Thank God for MS Word and spell and grammar check.

So her we go!!!! I would suffer a hundred more wrecks to fell this again! It was perfect!

There reached a point on a long straight stretch of road that the wind was perfectly at my back not one degree off in either direction. So I kicked my speed up and suddenly all was still.

Very still.

The air stopped moving across my skin. Even though I was moving at 18 miles an hour there was nothingness. No sound. No pain. The sky was brighter and bluer. My senses we overloaded and underwhelmed. I was transcendent. I broached time and space, and everything stood still. For a few brief monuments there was nothing, but there was everything.

1 comment:

Wow, Buzz! The pain will soon go, but the memories and the feeling will be unforgettable. I totally understand what you describe. I feel that sense of defying gravity, of defying everything we know during the day and letting go for a few instants while I'm in the water. It's nirvana!

About Me

I am a life long science fiction fan. The adventure the created works of the lunminaries of the genre inspired me to go forth and have my own adventures in the real world. I am a retired U.S. Navy sailor, and the father of two wonderful young women. I also have seven cats and three dogs. All of them were rescued animals.